


Seven: Descant

by Ellen_Weaver



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-08-29 11:51:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 17,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8488282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellen_Weaver/pseuds/Ellen_Weaver
Summary: Once upon a time, the Goblin King's world fell down, but it was a fall of his own making. The terrible Lady who rules the underworld offers to give him back what was stolen, but at the price of seven songs of truth.  Can Jareth redeem himself and find absolution for all the cruel things he's done?Based off of Frances Osgood's story "Seven."





	1. Chapter 1

**Seven: Descant**

* * *

**_Author's Note: "Seven: Descant"_ ** _is based off an initial premise by FrancesOsgood in her story "Seven." She's written a melody and I've written a descant. Many of our chapter have common themes, and borrow and intercut liberally from one another, but they are two very different stories. If you would like to play with this prompt, be our guest, but give FrancesOsgood a credit. The price is seven songs._

_This is a scary story, and a sad one. Themes of "Seven: Descant" include Dark!Jareth (with all that that implies), the objectifying female gaze, rape, trauma, and revenge. Reader discretion is advised._

* * *

**I. The Curtain Rises**

He reached up as he fell, clawing with useless fingers against the spread of loose dirt and mirror-slick edges of an endless hole. And he landed with an ignominious bump that set his spine rattling from tailbone to skull.

"Ow," he said, picking himself up and dusting himself off. He shielded his eyes from the scree-flow of dirt and glitter and feathers that had accompanied him on his way down. When the storm had passed, he scanned his surroundings. Upward, nothing. Only darkness. As above, so below: this place seemed one long cavernous corridor of cold and heavy stone. It felt like a tomb. Worse than that, he seemed to have lost his boots in the descent, and the floor of this place was cold against his stockinged feet.

Fragments of memories scattered around him like the detritus of his fall. A ruined city, the broken arches of stairs, and the defiant green eyes of a woman-child giving him some terrible word. Two things he couldn't recall, and these two misplaced concepts bothered him greatly: he didn't know where he was, and he couldn't recall his name.

He heard an owl's scream somewhere far out in the distance, and he raised his hands to summon… something, anything in his defense, but his hands had lost some sort of implicit knack. He remembered that he was a magical creature. He huffed a sigh of satisfaction and straightened his shoulders. He had power, even if he couldn't remember how to use it quite at the moment. He wouldn't be afraid.

"Do you remember me?" a woman's voice murmured, jolting him into tension. It was a voice all made of pillow-talk and sweetness, but it frightened him nonetheless. He kept his composure with some difficulty and turned to face her. She was as lovely as her voice had promised. Her skin was white and her lips were red and her eyes were green, and her dark hair was so black that it seemed to melt in the high collar of her feather mantle. "Do you remember why you have come to me?"

"To the best of my memory, which is admittedly a bit fractured, my lady, I don't believe we've met before." He inclined his head in a way that was not quite a bow, but rather how he might have faced some sort of dangerous predator; obliquely, respectfully, warily. "So I couldn't have come to you willingly. However, I would be happy to be your escort out, if you would be so kind as to show me the way." She was so beautiful, so perfect, so commanding, that he gave her a nobility's accord without quite thinking about it. It occurred to him that he also was noble, and a king of his own country, just as she might be the queen of this one. And he knew with certainty that she, too, was a magical being; she fairly crackled with power.

"Lady," he asked haltingly, "Do you know who I am?"

"Oh yes," she said quietly, and stepped up close to him. "You are… dangerous." Her body was perfumed with something dark and heady, and her eyes were ringed with kohl, like a raccoon-mask in the dark. She smelled of old leaves of paper, and exotic liquor, and the sweet musk of a woman-child brought to bed for the first time. Familiar scents, beguiling ones, but he flinched away as she touched his face. "But perhaps you're not so dangerous as I am."

He backed away a careful step, keeping her always in his eyes. "I thank you for the compliment, Lady, but I am weary and I dislike riddles. If you won't give me directions, I suppose I'll have to help myself. Good day, or good evening, whichever it may be."

He turned on his heel and walked quickly away down the long stone corridor, ears pricking up for the slightest sound of noise, for any redoubling of the scent of her body, but caught nothing. Guts twisting in dread, he moved away down the dreary echoing hall as quickly as he could.

It seemed as though he walked for a very long time in that endless darkness. There was no breath of draft; even the air was heavy in this kingdom. He found it remarkably depressing, this sameness, this endless dark, where he had to keep his hand raised in front of him to avoid bashing his head against any sudden wall. After uncountable hours, when he saw the glimmer of green touchwood lamps ahead of him in the dark, he felt some hope. He could smell the smutty reek of desert incense, the smell of outside air, and he increased his pace until he was practically jogging. But all his hopes were dashed as the corridor widened and he saw a dark figure sitting on a throne on a dais.

It was the Lady again. Somehow, she had gotten ahead of him, and met him here. He approached her bravely and stood before her throne of black ice, but he did not kneel.

"Here you are again," she said lovingly. "Oh, how you must have wanted me, to run back to me so quickly."

"Do not," he said, feeling the beginnings of anger in his breast, "Think to play games with _me_ , my lady."

She laughed, parting the devastating red wound of her mouth, the tendons in her neck pulsating. Her teeth were white as salt. "But I know you like games," she said in her courtesan's voice, smooth and warming as whiskey. "Games of the dark, games of the flesh, games to be won. I have a game you will like."

"Oh?" He laughed under his breath, but his heart was cold in his breast and it beat and beat.

"You've lost everything. Your name, your sight, your memory, your power. Your life. I hold all of you in my hand. But I will give all these things back to you for a price. That is my game."

"What price, then?" he asked, staring hard at her. "With what coin? For as you have said, I have nothing but myself and the clothes on my back."

"You can pay me with the one thing you have left, the one thing I cannot claim. You have your nature. Your soul thrums with music. Give that music to me. Seven songs you'll make for me, in the abandoned land of Oo-Belial-Yet. And if you can do this, I'll give you back what was stolen."

 _Oubliette_ , he thought. _A place you put people to forget about them. A memory-hole. I remember I had such things in my kingdom. There are guardians set in such places, to eat up the remains of forgotten things. She may be one such._

"Seven songs in seven nights, and win back what was stolen. Seven _true_ songs. Or fail, and lose yourself completely and forever, and not even the memory of forgetting what you've lost. Seven songs on seven themes, or you'll forfeit your hopes and the scraps of dreams." Her smile was like blood, her eyes like balefire.

"I will fight you," he said mildly, though the counter-threat was implicit in the stance of his shoulders and strong forearms.

"Oh, Jareth," she said, speaking his name in tones honey-sweet as an ache. "I'll welcome the distraction of any defense you make for yourself. That, too, will satisfy me greatly. Answer me now, no more delays. Will you play?"

His own name thrummed like electricity in his veins. _I am Jareth_ , he thought. _And if she knows my name when I do not, she can provide the rest of what she's promised. That is, if I win._

"I agree," he said.


	2. Overture and Incidental Music

**II. Overture and Incidental Music**

* * *

The Lady's palace was so dark and cold. Jareth shivered as he stood before her. Seven songs in seven nights, or to be lost forever. It wasn't the best bargain he ever remembered making, but then, his memory wasn't what it had been.

"You tremble," she breathed, from her throne of black ice. "Are you afraid?"

He laughed at her. His laughter died an early death as he saw how unmoved she was by his defiance.

"I'm shivering because I'm cold," he said, making it a statement of fact, though incomplete. He _was_ afraid, and he covered it with courtly flirtation. "I think you must be cold, too, Lady. Your throne seems made of ice." She lounged back against that throne, and her lips made motions toward a smile that never quite reached her eyes. Lamp-stands in the shape of torturous gargoyles bent under their weight of bowls of green fire which, like her green eyes, gave out light yet illuminated nothing.

"Yes," she whispered in the vast echoing darkness of her throne-room. "Yes, I am very cold. But you're here to warm me, Jareth."

Invisible hands caught him up, and raised him up on a plinth. From her throne on her dais, they were at eye level with one another.

"Let me warm you," she said with a sibilant hiss.

He felt the invisible hands again on him, and saw that these servants of hers had the shadows of horned imps, but no visible substance. At first he struggled against their intrusive, insolent handling, but he saw the pleasure it gave the Lady to see him fight back, and calmed himself. He left his hands at his sides and stared hard at her, keeping himself still even when the gentle assault on him became invasive. These hands stole his torn vest from him, and then his silk shirt, and finally even his pants. He gritted his teeth when they came to pull off his stockings and private garments, but kept his eyes fixed upon the woman on her icy throne, neither helping nor hindering the thieves. His flesh quilled as he stood there naked before her, and then he trembled again—from cold, from cold.

"You have interesting ideas of how to warm me, Lady," he said, scowling. "By denuding me, you've made me even colder than I was before."

"And yet I'm warmer," she said. "Soon you will be, too." Her smile became predatory. He felt himself touched by those eyes, shaped and measured and held and stroked. And the invisible hands of her minions touched him as well, leaving nothing of his own flesh to himself. He was warmer, Jareth realized with a small shock of horror. Her invasive and cruel appraisal of his naked body was arousing, and the stroking caresses of the shadows made his blood heat in his veins. This shame was not unique in his experience, but he remembered it better from the position of doling it out, and not receiving it.

"Are you planning to keep me naked? Perhaps have me mount you? Here I thought all you wanted were my songs." He put his hands on his hips and struck a defiant pose.

"Oh, Jareth," she said, laughing like a little girl. "I don't let wild creatures into my bed. You might bring fleas. You will need taming first." Her eyes glowed like hellish lamps in the dark and he trembled, and this time not from cold. "I will collar you, I think." Her voice held hints of desire and cruelty in equal measure, as it crooned out a prediction. "A collar all made of gold and bronze, a collar I'll hang around that slender white neck."

He gave her an impudent grin; his inmost self did not feel the least bit cheerful. "When can I expect this lavish gift from my lady?"

She rested her face against her gloved hand. "Soon," she murmured. The air reeked with the perfume of dead ashes and sex. "One night soon. When you beg me for it."

"You'll wait a pretty while, Lady, to see me beg," he snapped. The invisible hands came against his naked body again, and he flinched from them. But this time, they came not to arouse but to clothe him, in leather pants, a loose black shirt, and a coat made of the overlapped carapaces of giant scarab beetles, lined with black down. The new boots reached to his knees, and gleamed with the same iridescent oil-sheen as the enameling of the jacket. He smiled, admiring himself.

"You enjoy my gifts?"

"Your kingdom, Lady, seems mostly horrid from what I can see," he replied, catching a length of a black tattered cloak up over his arm. "But your taste in clothing is impeccable."

"Your vision is quite narrow," the Lady murmured, drawing herself up off her icy throne like a ripple of water. "In truth, you are blind, so let me begin there. When I ask it of you, your first song will be one of sight and blindness."

"I'll need an instrument," he objected.

"No," she said, with a note of anger roughening her voice and making the air around her shimmer. "You only need yourself. The music is inside you, and so are the words." She raised her hands above her head and clapped them sharply, and seemed to dissolve into a roiling ball of fabric and fur which became a shadow-owl, disappearing into the shadow-hall.

"Tonight," her voice echoed in the horizontal darkness. "You will sing."


	3. A Song of Sight and Blindness

**III. A Song of Sight and Blindness**

* * *

When he was certain the Lady had gone, or at least that her attention was directed elsewhere, Jareth carefully felt with his feet for the edges of the plinth he was standing on and boosted himself down from its three-foot height. His boots clacked uncertainly on the floor; the arch of the high heels forced the muscles of his back and legs into poses of incipient fornication that weren't exactly helpful to climbing off furniture.

He hadn't been commanded to stay, or stay here at least. He stalked down the left-hand corridor using the throne and his platform—the only visible things in the stone-echoing gloom—as navigational lodestones. His thighs and buttocks burned with the unaccustomed exercise. It occurred to him that while he might be used to dancing in these slutty heels, he wasn't accustomed to walking any great distance in them. He walked a great distance, letting his anger feed and energize him in the place of rest and food. Anger was surely better than fear, and he had no intention of giving the Lady the pleasure of seeing him afraid.

He walked for what seemed several miles, or for several hours, only stumbling once or twice in the darkness against the wall or strange and inimical décor. His breath and his footsteps became a metronome, setting a rhythm for a song that began to echo inside him.

_Sight and blindness_ , he thought. _I'm blind; give me sight to see. Give me wings to fly. Give me food to eat. Don't let me cry._

He elaborated on his thoughts as he walked, and the rhythm of the words soothed his uneasiness at how impressively huge the Lady's palace seemed to be.

_I'm blind, give me light to see._  
_I'm close to broken, you'll never get to break me._  
 _If I could see, I'd see my way to fly…_  
 _Up there above you, you couldn't see me cry._  
 _And when I hide, you can only seek by finding._  
 _I can't see, and you make visions blinding._

He began to get a sense of the rhythm of the music, and he let a few strange, aggressive notes slip out with half-formed words under his breath. Jareth felt, as he walked, that some light must be visible in the darkness up ahead, some exit, some turning. He walked more quickly, becoming desperate, losing the tempo of his nascent song, and in one moment more cried out with pain as his thighs and hips collided with an unseen obstacle. He hissed and rubbed away the pain.

He was back at his perch, back before the Lady's icy throne. His wings had been clipped. This place was a closed loop, with no exit. Left, or right, it was all the same: all paths led back to captivity. "Damn you!" he said angrily. He bent over the lip of the platform, resting his head and chest upon it.

"If I could see, I'd see my way to fly," he choked out in broken notes.

A light bloomed in the dark above his head with the wheezing accompaniment of a hurdy-gurdy. He looked up, and then climbed back atop the platform. There was a lamp in the shape of a white face, with huge terrified eyes that released green sparks and noisome perfumed witchfire. Jareth reached out a hand to touch it, and drew back when the heated porcelain burned him.

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed," he sang in a doleful key. An oboe purred as he sang, and a candle appeared at his feet, illuminating a soft padded cushion and rough blanket. He stopped himself before he could accidentally finish the verse.

"Give me a key out of this place?" he sang, experimentally. But no key appeared. The lamp and the candle continued to sullenly burn at his head and his feet.

"Ah," he said. He sat down cross-legged upon his perch and removed his boots, wiggling his toes.

"Out, flickering lights, back to the dark that made you," he trilled curiously, to the pop of finger-cymbals.

The lamp and candle disappeared.

"Shave and a haircut, two bits?" he sang hopefully. Nothing happened. But Jareth felt he had learned something useful. What he sang would come to be, provided he was singing to the Lady's theme, and upon the stage she had set for him.

"Dinner by candlelight, a treat, the sweetest meal to see, to eat," he intoned. Again, musical instruments made their song out of nowhere to accompany the right lyrics.

A candelabra made of a deer's antler illuminated a dish of fruit and cheese and a bottle of sweet wine.

He ate methodically, considering what other elaborations upon his confinement he might be able to make. He also considered, carefully, what weapons might be his.

* * *

When the Lady returned to collect her song, Jareth was ready for her. She appeared upon her throne in a rush of shadows, in a dress so deeply grey it appeared black. The crenulations of the iron crown upon her head gave the impression of owl's horns. She smiled at his improvements to his stage. He had ringed the seven-sided plinth with white candles whose heat had licked at the icy edges of her throne. He bowed to her when her gloved hands gave him mocking applause.

"A Song of Sight and Blindness," Jareth said gently. His voice poured from his throat like liquid sugar spiked with broken glass. It was an angry song. Jarring chords of bass and broken guitar filled the hall as his song burst forth in a series of accusations.

_You brought me here to show you who I am._  
_You told me I was blind, and you'd give me light to see._  
_Light, oh light, it's the seeing edge of heat._  
_That heat comes from me._

_You say I'm blind and you give no light to me._  
_And now I see you can only seek by hiding._  
I won't be broken and you'll never get to break me!  
_I can still see, though your darkness is blinding._

_I'll see the escape that I am searching for._  
_Don't dare to stop me, I still want what I can't see._  
_All I want to see is the exit door,_  
_All I want is to be free._

_You say I'm blind and you'll give the gift of sight_  
And I have to play your game, this game of hide-and-seek.  
_I'll still be unbroken, but you'll shatter in the light._  
_A week, your weakness, your pique, this week._

She sat frozen to her throne of ice, her eyes blazing with fury. Jareth gave her a mocking bow.

"Lady," he said, "How like you your singing bird now?"

"Your song doesn't please," she said.

"Ah, but you never said the songs had to be pleasing, only true." He stepped down from his perch and stood tall before her.

"Truth," she said, curiously. "Oh yes. Truth." She stood up and the folds of her grey-black dress cascaded across the stone floor. She took his face in her little hands. "Proper payment, then, for your song," she whispered. She spat in his eye.

He shrieked and clapped his hands over his stinging eyeball. Her spit burned like acid. He bent over double with the intense pain of it.

"A little seasoning for your vitreous humor," the Lady told him. "You spat in my face with that song. Now I've spat in yours. Sight and blindness. A very valuable gift."

He drew his knuckles away from his face. One eye had broken, indeed. It was black now, all pupil dilated to let in the light in glorious pain.

"You bitch!" he shouted, with the force of his agony.

"Oh yes," she said. "A bitch, a woman, and your tormentor, Jareth. Consider your lyrics more prudently next time you sing to me."

"Hurt me again, and I'll kill you," he promised, eyes leaking with anguished pain.

" _Kill_ me?" the Lady said, and laughed. "Can ice kill ice? Can cruelty kill cruelty? You are here to keep me company in the long and endless dark. Tomorrow night, sing me a song of how you are trapped here, and wish it weren't with me. Sing me a song of my unwanted company, for I am your perpetual companion until your songs are sung. ."

He stared up at her in hate.

The Lady clapped her hands over her head and became an owl once more, swooping off and whistling to itself in glee in the darkness.


	4. A Song of Companionship and Company

**IV. A Song of Companionship and Company  
**

* * *

Jareth crouched in the darkness, feeling only the pain of his wounded eye. The tears came to soothe it, and he resented them—but at least she wasn't there to see.

Later, he was able to stand and look. Experimentally, he looked at the long corridor with first one eye, then the hurt one, and then both.

He was able to see more than he had before. His mortal eye could see little but shadow and fugue: her empty throne, his empty stage and the thick darkness between. His cursed eye, however… that saw much more. He could see the rough definitions of the weeping rock walls, even the misty outline of the rounded ceiling forty feet above him. All was featureless, except where twisted and menacing figures were intercut into the stone, and the Lady's servants who crept after him in his shadow's wake.

_I have seen things in this way before,_ he realized. _She meant to hurt me, but she also gave me back another thing I'd lost. A name, an eye, my magic vision. Things she's stolen from me, things she's changed in the interim. What else has she stolen? And what in Hell will I receive back tomorrow night, changed by her? Do I even want it?_

There was a new passage to try in front of him, appearing as if summoned. Opposite the wide space of the Lady's icy throne, seven-sided, very high, encrusted about the lintels with ugly sculptures of human and inhuman bodies tearing and grasping each other, in the throes of mutual torture, or of sexual frenzy. When Jareth looked at it with his mortal eye, it seemed to disappear into the shadows. When he looked at it only with the eye the Lady had spat in, the figures seemed to writhe and move. When he pressed against it, it opened easily.

It led directly back to the place he'd come from.

Jareth cursed and swore and stamped his feet for a few minutes, angry at being thwarted. He stood back up on his pedestal, since it seemed he had no choice to stay or go anywhere. He paced round and round upon his stage, wondering how he might sing on the theme of company when he had no power over his own presence in this awful place. As he paced, it seemed that the seven-sided pedestal grew larger and larger to accommodate the rhythm of his stride, becoming a room, and then a tableland, and finally perhaps the world entire.

He thought he could hear voices just underneath the crack of his heels, and stopped.

Nothing.

He resumed his rounds, and he could hear the voices again.

Jareth kept walking, round about, up and down, to and fro, and as he walked, he listened.

It was a woman's voice he heard, pleading. He liked that tone. But whoever she was, she wasn't addressing him, and that pleased him less. As he listened, he felt almost certain that he knew the woman, knew the voice, but the only face the sound conjured was that of the Lady.

"I need your help," she had said. "The Catholic church won't help me, and the Lutherans think I'm crazy. But you know what's going on. You know it's _real_."

"Cases of demonic oppression like the one you describe aren't unknown among my people," a man responded. "But you say this isn't a demon, and it probably isn't one, and I am not sure if the dybbuk-box would even work for you. And even if it did, there are life-long responsibilities that come along with trapping the evil spirit. Our method isn't like Christian exorcism. The banishment isn't performed at once and then over. You'll have to tend the dybbuk-box until it quiets. That could take years, or your lifetime, or beyond your lifetime. I would like you to think very carefully about whether tending the box is something you're prepared to commit to. It will not be easy."

Her voice was slow and achingly tired in her reply, and Jareth felt sorry for her. He, too, was being oppressed by a demon. "I've already had to endure years of this," the woman said. "I'm still alive, but I don't know how much longer I can go on. Rabbi, let me try the box. Please. It's my last hope."

The man murmured a prayer. Jareth recognized the language as Aramaic—not the thinly gliding tones of the modern world, but a prayer from when the Hebrew people had been wanderers in the desert.

"It comes to you, then, spirit of the dybbuk-box," the man's voice said in that ancient language. "For a thousand thousand years you have listened to the prayers of women, and for every prayer answered Adonai has forgiven you a day of your sentence for your crimes. I can't judge whether this woman is deserving of your help or if helping her will be recognized by the Most High. But it would be a blessing. You must decide what you will do for her."

Somewhere very near him, Jareth heard a woman singing. He strained to hear what more might be said, but he paused in his walking, and the voices blew out like candles.

Jareth bared his sharp teeth to the darkness and hissed. "You are my unwanted company, Lady. You are an evil spirit, entrapped in your own kingdom. And it's for me to judge you. Beware my song."

He would give the Lady exactly the song she deserved. She would learn what it cost to make a king into her slave. He would teach her. He would make the lesson sting worse than his eye.

* * *

When the Lady appeared that evening, her throne-room had been changed into a banqueting-hall. The long table was set with white linen and pewter flatware. Desiccated, rotted, and live blossoms overspilled the low vases. The baked and the sweet were on offer, as were several jugs of wine.

And there were people! Such people, all of them made from shadows and songs, yet somehow substantial, in rich colors and fabrics and half-masks on their faces, quick with open smiles and ready banter, joking and laughing, and inviting the Lady to join them at the feast, though they were only her imps dressed up in his glamour. Seven huge mirrors reflected the light and warmth of the party assembled there. Her throne was the head of the table, and the table was his stage, his cage. The laughter never quite touched her, and he could tell that the food for her had all the savour of sand, the wine all the joy of brackwater.

"My servant," she said haltingly. "These illusions are tiresome. Entertain me with your song."

"Gladly," he said, jumping atop the table, dislodging many dishes and flowers and bowls of sweetmeats and carafes of wine. The shadows peeled back from his presence.

"A Song of Unwanted Company," Jareth said, and the strum of unseen harps and the vibrating cadences of hautbois rose to accompany him.

_The lost and the lonely, they congregate here,_   
_Listening to the song you've demanded to hear._   
_I bring you my company, but we're alone._   
_They're only shadows; we're alone._

_Drink you the wine, your cup runneth over._  
_The guest pour you more, or hand you another._  
_I give you good company, but we're alone._  
_The wine brings no cheer; we're alone._

_Eat you the food, your plate can hold more._  
_I've laid you this feast, and yet it's a bore._  
_Unwanted company, but we're alone._  
_The food has no taste; we're alone._

_Queen of the shadows, you're without peer._  
_Don't you understand what's happening here?_  
_You wanted my company, and you're alone._  
_We've only each other; we're alone._

He walked slowly down the length of the table as he sang, carelessly kicking aside the tableware and candelabra which vanished before they could hit the floor and shatter. And one by one, the guests, the food, the drink, and the warmth disappeared as well as he sang. At the very end, he lowered himself on one knee before her, and took up a knife from the feast and held it to her throat. He saw her pulse beat against the tip of the blade, embedded in her tender flesh.

"Now," Jareth said, looking the Lady in the eyes. "Know that I would kill you now, but nothing on Earth or Under would save me from being alone once I'm rid of you. I play your game to be parted from the unwelcome company of you, your servants, and your kingdom. And I know that you deserve to be here. Admit that, vexatious spirit." One drop of blood trickled down to nest in the hollow of her throat.

"Yes," she said. Her calm mask had dropped; she was trembling. Tears shone in her eyes. One landed on the blade of his knife, and he brought it to his lips and drank it. If misery had a taste, it was salt water. Jareth smiled cruelly at her as he cast the knife aside.

"You've broken my heart," she said through her tears, "Though I have no heart to break. Your song has reminded me of how lonely I am, and how lonely my kingdom. You sang a true song. I have earned my punishment. But Jareth, one other thing you should know." She stood, and wrapped her black mantle about her. Her blood was rubies around her neck. "If I deserve to be here, how much more do you deserve it, too?"

She opened her mouth and sang, and her voice was like the voice of the woman he'd head in the darkness.

_Women, all, may ask help from me_   
_I alone decide what the outcome shall be._   
_Only I am fit to judge your case,_   
_With seven trials that you must face._

_I'll bind the spirits of evil nature_   
_with arbitrary joy; such is my stature._   
_But all worthy souls will be set free._

"You must sing for me," the Lady said, and the blood-red rubies trickling down her white skin became sand, became smoke, vanished utterly. "So that I may know you. You must sing, so that you may know yourself. You are the one being judged. This is our game. Play your part, and stop hurting me."

"What?" he scoffed. "I can see now you're not mortal flesh, as I am. The only way I can fight you is to hurt your spirit. I will, Lady. I will do whatever it takes so that you feel in your soul the torments I have in mine. If you can't understand this, you can't understand me."

"Just so," the Lady sighed through her tears. "I don't understand. But… if I were, if I could, if I had skin and bones and flesh to bleed and break, wouldn't I understand? This you must do, Jareth. Tomorrow night, sing a song of the pleasures and pains of the flesh. Sing to me. Let me know what a mortal woman knows. Let me feel what she feels. Make me feel… alive."

"Lunacy," he said, shaking his head. "I know what happens when I sing. I make things _real_. You couldn't possibly want to give me that power over you."

"It isn't what I want that matters here," she whispered. "This place, and me, and even your music... it's all for you." And she ran away like a mortal woman, in a rush of taffeta skirts.

 


	5. A Song of the Pleasure and Pains of the Flesh

**V. A Song of the Pleasure and Pains of the Flesh**

* * *

All in all, Jareth was more pleased than disturbed by his night's cruel work. He'd wounded her deeply enough to draw tears, if not blood. Her tears were a gift; the taste of them recalled something to him. He'd tasted something like them before. He wanted to taste them again.

"I will!" he shouted into the echoing darkness of her throne room. "I will hurt you!" But he was a musician, and knew all the tones of voice that betokened mood. His tone wasn't triumphant. It was sorrowful. It was lonely.

His music was a sword with a blade for a hilt. No matter who wielded it or was wounded by it, the effect was the same. He hurt. He felt, very strongly now, how deeply he'd hurt himself. He felt alone, and he felt hungry for her company.

Still, he waited a goodly long time, prolonging the wait, before he opened the doorway opposite the throne. It opened upon a long passage of space, an echoing corridor of more darkness and emptiness. He walked for a long time, it seemed, but the passage finally let out into a broadened space, where the Lady was sleeping in her bed.

* * *

She slept as a child might sleep, curled up on herself for comfort, a look of unhappiness on her face.

She had waited a long time for him, it was certain, Jareth mused. She had had time to want and wait, and time to weep, if the redness of her eyes was any indication. She had had time for longing and disappointment; the white candles on their stands around her bed burnt down into cups of wax.

He looked down on her. The white bedclothes were pulled down to her waist, and her body was hidden by the long skeins of her black hair and the innocent cut of her long nightgown. With an air of jaded debauchery, he grabbed the sheet and the featherbed and slowly tugged them down off her body to the foot of her bed. The slowly receding tide of white bedlinen delivered her to his eyes bit by bit, until she lay there fully revealed before him, the covers bunched at the foot of the bed, her thin nightgown showing every contour of her fresh and nubile body.

He felt like a gourmet in the face of an often-sampled but exquisitely-prepared dish. He had a strong sense of deja-vu, watching her: old lust remembered, old games re-played. The Lady's wide round bed was meant to hold two; she slept on the left-hand side, and the pillows of the right-hand side were without indentation-as if she were waiting, even in sleep, for someone to come and sleep next to her. He took this as invitation.

"Lady," he said softly. She startled up, as if his voice had been a thunderbolt. Her arms and hands came up to shield herself modestly, though she was hardly nude. Again, this was familiar, as if he had confronted a dark-haired green-eyed red-lipped woman-child in similar conditions.

"Go away," she said, blushing. "I don't want you here."

"Too bad," he said, letting his eyes roam over her luscious curves, fruit to be peeled, juices to squeeze. "I'm here for inspiration. You've given me my theme; I am here to show you a beginning to the work you've set me to do." He saw her perfect little red lower lip tremble like a droplet of blood, and felt himself stir. "Don't cry," Jareth commanded her. "You'll spoil the pleasure." He unknotted the cords that held his cloak under his shoulder and let it fall to the floor.

"Do you love me?" the Lady's breathy little voice asked. He watched her, watching him, and felt his hateful desire reflected in him, as if in a mirror.

"Love you?" Jareth said dubiously. "Oh no. _Not_ love you, but certainly I'll fuck you." He undid the frogs that held his jacket closed and shrugged it from his shoulders. He drew his black shirt up and over his white muscular arms. He nodded at the empty space in her bed. "Will your husband be back soon? I'd prefer no interruptions."

"I have no husband," she said sadly.

"So it's also my job to comfort you in your loneliness. What irony." He gripped the footboard of the bed; it was, like her throne, made all of black ice. He intended to hurt her. He intended to leap upon her like an animal, rend her with his nails and bite her with his teeth, put scars of red and pink on that perfect white skin, and steal his pleasure from her. He would hurt her. He would. In just one moment more, he would.

Instead, he eased off his boots, standing first on one foot, then another. He knew he looked silly, and the Lady laughed, but her laughter was friendly. He smiled back at her and then removed the very last of his clothing. Then he remembered again how much he despised her, and how much she deserved his contempt. He made his face cold even as the rest of his body grew hot.

"Go away," she said coyly.

"No." He slapped his naked flesh and crawled into her bed atop her, drawing up the hem of her nightgown, drawing down his hands over her silk-soft thighs. "By the gods of Hell, you asked me for this song, and I will deliver it. I will shove it directly up inside you." He hovered over her on his hands and knees, and kissed her mouth. Her body became pliant under him. "Tell me, my lady," he said, beginning his tender first strike, at which she cried out in pleasure and pain, "Can you truly appreciate womanhood now?"

* * *

Later, much later, when the candles had guttered into drowned pricks of light and he dozed in post-coital exhaustion, he felt her struggle against him, trying to dislodge his weight. _I have been here before_ , Jareth thought. _But not with this one. Who was she? She loved me like this, touched me like this, knew me like this._

"Sarah?" he murmured, sitting suddenly up.

"Who?" the Lady's voice was light, as if he'd told a joke.

"My... a woman." He jerked away from her as if she were some poisonous insect. He threw himself out of the bed, naked, wearing only a sheet knotted around his middle. Her scent and the smell of his own rut made his head swim with desire and despair. "I don't remember what happened. But I remember her name. Sarah. She was mine. And you took me away from her." He hid his face in his hands and sobbed in three sharp spasms.

"Jareth," the Lady said coldly, "This display is most unbecoming. You'll damage your voice."

"I don't care," he said hoarsely. "Every way through just leads to something more wretched. Every song is like a link in a chain, binding me to you. Even if I win our game, I'll never be free." He turned his back to her, wiping his face on his wrists.

"Jareth," she said. "It's time for your song. It's time that you sang to me again."

"No!," he screamed, he begged, but invisible hands of her servants clutched him tight, and propelled him back to kneel before her. Her bed was the heptagonal stage, and the headboard was her throne, and perhaps always had been so.

"Sing," she commanded, and her servants' hands gripped his neck and forced his head upright.

"A Song of the Pleasure and Pains of the Flesh," he said weakly, and kept his face turned from her. The sound of a distant reed-pipe brought low resonance to his soft and broken voice as he began to sing.

_All I know of pleasure is the memory of its absence._  
_All I know of pain is the careful pain you give._  
_I don't understand what has happened to me._  
_I don't understand what it means to live._

_Your flesh brought me pleasure, the grasp of your embrace._  
_Your flesh brought me pain; I despise your awful love,_  
_I don't understand what has happened to me._  
_I don't understand how this helps you to live._

_I lived without pain in the circle of my own company_  
_I lived without care, but my memory's a sieve._  
_I don't understand why you've done this to me,_  
_But my flesh still reminds me that I want to live._

_My heart is flesh._  
_It aches here, unhealed._  
_If this pain will buy my life,_  
_then it's my pleasure  
to be real._

Jareth's heart was stabbed through with a dagger of ice, just as he'd stabbed her inviting body with a dagger made of flesh. He remembered flying. He remembered flying on the wings of an owl. He remembered soaring in flight above Sarah's body, which fought and then welcomed him. He remembered the pleasures of her flesh. He remembered loving her.

And the Lady wore her face.

"Yes," the Lady with Sarah's body said. She curled around him softly, like the serpent round the apple.

"Don't," he begged her. "You're not the one I want."

"Yes, I am," she said, kissing his face with pinpricks of ice-fire. "Forget her, Jareth, and think instead of me."

"No," he said, and pushed her away from him, but her hands had become like bird's talons and he couldn't break her grip.

"Don't you know me?" she asked, leaning over him, crushing the breath from him, kissing him. "You know me. I am one of the daughters of the First Woman, who lay with demons in the wilderness." Her eyes became two glowing green crystals, full of power. "I devour the essence of men, and give them dreams of untold rapture. I suck the breath of male babies in the cradle, and feast upon the lamentations of their mothers. I am the dybbuk, Jareth, and I have chosen you as my mate."

"Get off me!" he screamed.

"Tomorrow night," she panted, and he felt her take him up inside her, squeezing him, choking him, forcing awful pleasure from him until he thought he would go utterly mad. "Tomorrow night, a song of the memory of a dream, all the better to help you forget what troubles you so. And when your song is sung, you will forsake all others, and give yourself to me."

Her dark wings spread over his head; he knew no more.

 


	6. A Song of Dreams and Memories

**VI. A Song of Dreams and Memories  
**

* * *

**_(Author's Note: This contains scenes alluding to sexual assault. Reader discretion advised.)_  
**

* * *

When Jareth woke, the Lady was gone, and he was sprawled across the cold space of her bed, which was also his stage, her altar, and his prison. He hissed in pain as he tried to move, for he had become frozen to it, like a dead animal iced into a puddle. With an awful tear that seemed to take half the skin of his naked body with it, he sat up. His hair crackled with ice; his body bled snow.

His clothing and boots lay scattered on the floor where he had discarded them last night, in frozen lumps that kept their shape when he picked them up again. He couldn't sing for more; he felt empty of everything. He was too cold, cold like a revived zombie put to some terrible and endless task. When he put his clothing back on, its frost-hardened edges seemed a movable dungeon.

"I remember warmth and heat," he sang, his voice a sliver in the dark. But since this was a lie, nothing came to warm him. "I remember life and how I lived with a heartbeat," he tried again, with the same results.

What he remembered of warmth was frenzied love-making with the Lady, and his body endlessly spasming into hers, emptying itself into her helplessly, unable to stop. The heat of his flesh had all seemed to drain down her greedily drinking nether-mouth during that forced congress, heat stolen from him.

_Don't keep that memory_ , he told himself. _Throw it away._

"Away!" he said out loud, but the memory wouldn't go. The folds of her enclosing him, the icy-sweet feeling of her carrion kisses on his flinching mouth—and her face, the memory of Sarah's face, more beautiful than what he could remember of Sarah , because in her all of Sarah's mortal imperfections had been scoured away.

"Sarah," he groaned, pitifully, musically, falling down against the side of the plinth. "Help me. Give me a memory of _you_!"

Jareth closed his eyes and felt himself flush with life in the sudden memory of Sarah's embrace. Her skin had been as soft as milk and almost as white on the swelling roundness of the undersides of her breasts. He had tasted those breasts and found them sweet as cream, and the parted mound of her sex sweeter still, after he had carefully wakened it to pleasure. Her eyelashes had been like soot, and the tears she had shed hadn't washed their own blackness away. Bitter, salt, but hot nonetheless.

Her mouth had been red as blood, red from his kisses and the love-bites he bestowed on her opened lips. Red as the stitching she had opened across his back with her sharp fingernails, red virgin's blood which she had let drop in rightful tribute to his conquest. Oh, that blood had been warm! And the core of her, the secret places of her body, they had been warmer still. She had been a liquid fire, her body all pleasure to burn.

"Wait," Sarah begged him, tears standing out in her eyes. "Stop. You're hurting me!"

"Sweet girl, don't say so," Jareth whispered to her, to himself, and kissed that pleading mouth, tasting her fear. "The pain will pass." And it had; in slow moments she gave up resisting him and docilely followed his lead in the sex-dance, clumsy, evasive, but then faster and more quickly, her hips tilting to meet his, the blush of hot passion blooming on her cheeks. Their bodies arched together and she embraced him about the neck, but her face… that she kept averted from his eyes and the strength of his kisses, until he grasped her by the hair and gazed down at her through vision shuttered by his climax. And she had cried out, too.

"Sarah," Jareth murmured, remembering, and running his cold hand into the parted lips of his jacket and his shirt, warming himself against his hot beating heart. "Sarah, help me remember you. Help me remember. Help me."

Far off, like a bird-call, the scream of a woman in sexual rapture or the throes of torture, he heard her.

"Sarah?" Jareth called. He ran to the sound of her voice, clumsy in his ice-stiffened boots. "Sarah!" He warmed his hands against his heart one by one, and then warmed his face against his hands. His wounds stung as they revived from the cold.

Endless corridors he ran, the lefthand corridor, the right, the door facing the throne, first one, then another, calling out for her, hearing her cry out to him, now louder, now softer. He chased every echo, but found himself at every end once again standing before the seven-sided box that was his platform. Its silence was very loud in the emptiness of the world.

"Please!" he said, finally reduced to desperation as he found himself back where he'd begun for the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth time. "I beg you, Sarah. Help me. Please, please, help me!" He closed his eyes and felt his own hot tears stream down under his eyelids, and opened his ears to catch any breath or sign of her.

He heard her cry out, but not from outside. This sound was inside the room with him, and very near. It seemed to be coming from the stage, and he advanced in shrinking dread, wondering if it was another of the Lady's cruel games. But as he came closer to where he could hear Sarah singing, yes, singing through a voice choked with tears, he could see that the plinth had shrunk, and the proportions of the room around it, so that it was no larger than the size of an infant's coffin. It barely came to his ankles. He bent and picked it up.

It was heavy.

As he lifted it, he had the sickening feeling of the world shifting all around him. He shook it once—it was as heavy as it looked, and heavier—and the world shook under his feet. On the underside was a strange device melded into the metal, a double-spiral in iron inset into a gold double-bladed sigil. It made him think of an animal's horned head, or perhaps the cupping gesture of a bird of prey. It was familiar shape, but he couldn't remember what the device was except that it was personally significant.

He could hear Sarah's voice emanating from a lid folded in seven petals against itself. There were three slim apertures in this configuration; three loosened cracks in the lid. They weren't enough for a fingernail to slide through, but more than enough for sound to penetrate. And—perhaps vision.

_The same number of openings as songs I have sung_ , Jareth thought in sudden hope. _Perhaps this thing is the way out. For every song, an opened door._ He brought his face closer and closer until his broken eye stared through the biggest crack into the heart of the box itself.

Inside, Sarah's face, staring back at him like a guest before a peephole. Her eyes were downcast and red with weeping, but she was singing to him. She was singing a lullaby down at him as if he were a baby, and he felt himself being rocked and rocked, gently rocked as a fractious infant might be rocked to sleep.

"Sleep," she was begging him, red lips trembling. "Please sleep."

"Sarah!" he shouted at her, hoping that where his vision could pass, his voice could also. "Sarah, help me!"

He could see that she heard him; her face registered shock and then fear. "Shh," she said, face pale. "Be quiet, and sleep."

"I can't sleep," he said. "I'm cold and I'm frightened, and I'm trapped here with something terrible. I beg you, woman, get me out of here!"

She only shook her head.

_I am_ in _the box_ , he realized in awful horror as he felt the world around him lift and sway in time with the motion of his vision. _I am in the box, and Sarah is outside, holding the box where I am._ "Let me out now!" he shouted at her in paralyzing rage.

"No!" she shouted back. "I'll _never_ let you out!" Her eyes flashed in green. She thrust him away from her, put him away up high where he could see her face and shoulders _. On the shelf_ , Jareth thought, his anger warming him as nicely as the memory of lust. _She has put me on the shelf, like one of her toys._

"You had better do as I say," he said, in his quietest and most threatening voice. "For when I escape, I will settle accounts with you, Sarah. Trust me for _that_."

Sarah came very close to him again, close to the cracks in the box.

"You'll never get out," she told him, half-terrified, half-sneering. He couldn't see what her hands were doing, but he smelled the ignition of some rich fume, and curls of smoke wafted into his prison. Ritual incense, lit to subdue rebellious spirits. He snarled more threats at her, but the drugging tide of smoke made it impossible to keep talking. So he stared balefully at her instead, coughing, until the smoke stung his eyes and forced them closed.

With his eyes closed, he remembered approaching Sarah's bed for the last time, with anticipation and predatory glee. She had been awake for once, and perfumed in the cleft of her thighs and the hollows of her hands, which enticed him onward. Her body had been unyielding in the set of her shoulders, but this was only her usual way—she made him work for her surrender, made him earn every soft and tender inch of her. This last time, though, she had parted her legs like butterfly's wings in welcome, the white nylon of her translucent nightgown pooling into opaque folds between her thighs. He had remembered being eager for her, though some vital instinct had tried to warn him of the danger of this calm surrender when she'd always fought him before.

He remembered that her face had been very hard, hard as glass, but he had kissed that face anyway. And as she guided him into her, his joy at finally taming her to his will turned to pain and fear. The folds of her nightgown had hidden an iron box of arcane geometry concealed against her sex, and when he had thought to plunge into her body, he had instead plunged his manhood into the depths of that box. It had pulled him in by the tip of his erect cock in a terrible viselike grip, and he had screamed at the agony of it as the rest of his body followed with no mercy for the natural configurations of flesh and bone. There had been no point for purchase, no way to resist. He had fallen, and fallen, squeezed inside a narrow prison and plunged deep into the dark. It had felt like being born in reverse. It had been a species of death. It had brought him here.

When Jareth was able to look again, the crack in his prison had disappeared.

He cast the box away in anger. It did not vibrate or bounce; it landed against the floor like a weight of lead. When he went to pick it up again, it was his stage, and too heavy to lift. He put his hand upon it.

"It's true, then!" he shouted, hoping she could hear. "Sarah, you have put me here! You're the one who betrayed me!"

"And so now you remember," the Lady's cold voice informed him, "Sarah doesn't love you. Rather, she hates you. Will you claim she had no cause?" She stood on the other side of the seven-sided plinth, immaculate in her dress made of black starry sky and night-black mantle of feathers.

"Cause?" Jareth asked, teeth bared to remind her that he still considered her an enemy. "To do this to me? To lock me inside this prison with you, when all I ever did was grant her wishes and give her pleasures most human beings would sell their souls to experience? I reject that, Lady, as I reject your love. And I say now as I said to Sarah, I will make you pay exquisitely for your part in all this." The Lady stepped slowly sideways, ring-around-a-rosy, and he did the same, keeping pace with her, keeping the barrier of the box between them.

"I am the arbiter of judgement, and I am the deliverer of your sentence, Jareth, whatever that might be," the Lady said sweetly, as they did their rounds of pursuit and flight. "Don't think to threaten me. Instead, ask yourself if I gave to you as good as you gave Sarah, when you struggled against me and begged me to stop, and I did not. Was it not the same for her? Should you hold your victim to account, just as I hold you? Or do I deserve punishment, just as you do?"

_Do I deserve to be here?_ Jareth wondered. _Hasn't the Lady done to me what I have done to Sarah?_ For one moment, quick as the flash of green fire from an angry woman's eyes, he felt his conscience prick him. But then he put doubt aside.

"She is she, and I am me," Jareth said coldly. "There is nothing I have done that is not according to my nature. But she… she dared to defy me, and then to seduce me, and then to deny me, and finally to entrap me. As for you, Lady," he drew himself up to magnificent height, "Are you not also a prisoner here? Have you considered what I might do for you, if you allowed me to leave?"

"One way or another, Jareth," the Lady said, "You will leave. My way is the most certain. Are you ready to sing, and unlock one more door?" They had stopped their carousel game; now it was the box that turned between them, rotating as smoothly as if it were on wheels.

"I am," Jareth said. With one mighty leap, he surmounted his stage, and stood there turning, his voice echoing in all corners of the Lady's throne room. He certainly hoped Sarah was listening.

"A Song of the Memory of a Dream"

_Woman, I gave you every gift you asked for,_   
_But you refused my gifts and wouldn't take a one._   
_I was insistent lest rejection's tide should drown me,_   
_And gave you all my love. What else could I have done?_

_I remember love, but now I have to hate you,_   
_You've killed my love by your cruel schemes._   
_I'd prefer to then forget you, or forget how I did love you,_   
_Woman, you betrayed me. I curse you and all your dreams._

The stage beneath his feet stuttered to a stop as another hidden seal cracked open. His dizzying turning stopped, and left him standing in front of her.

"If that is your song, beloved, it will suffice," the Lady said.

Jareth bent down, took her perfect face in his hands, and kissed her. Then he struck her such a blow that she crumpled to the floor.

"It's a beginning," he said. He stared down at her, her skirts a starry cloud around her waist. "Tell me, Lady, whose side you are on, truly?"

Red blood seeped onto her white skin from a split red lip.

"Beautiful Jareth," she said. "I was asked to bind you and punish you and slowly devour you, as I've devoured so many meddling and paltry demons for hundreds of years, the better to dispose of them. But you're no demon. You're a king of the Third People of the Air, and your wickedness is as beautiful as your face. I must know you."

"Give me my theme for tomorrow's song," he said, towering over her from great heights. "And I'll show you all you can stand of me."

"It will have to be revenge," she said, eyes glowing with green fire. "Tell me what revenge you would have on the one who'd dare constrain you so."

"Excellent," he said, jumping down. He was still aware of the bitter cold, but it didn't seem to matter. The ice had penetrated all of him, and he felt no more hunger or weariness. Only his rage and his lust burned hot. He lifted the Lady back to her feet and kissed away the blood. "Tonight, I want you as my muse. You have the face of the woman I once loved, and I want to see that face weep. Now. Take off your dress."


	7. Chapter 7

**VII. A Song of Vengeance**

* * *

 

He took her in every way he could conceive of, sparing only her mouth—the better to hear her cry out in a now-familiar voice. She was so like Sarah that it felt like almost enough.

But although he was a magical creature, he was also mortal and made of living flesh, and so there came an ultimate limit of what he could mete out. The Lady's endurance was greater than his strength. When he grew tired, and the purse of his sex was empty of all its fleshly coin, he gave her over to her own shadow-imps as a plaything, and watched her body arch and contort over their meticulous attentions.

Now Jareth sat on the throne, and watched her perform her song and dance upon the stage, until that too grew unsatisfactory. He was annoyed with his own excess, and in any event, the Lady wasn't the one he truly hated or wanted. "Enough!" he said. He dismissed the servants with a wave of his hand, and the Lady collapsed in a quivering, sobbing huddle.

"Sweet balm of vengeance, served not cold, give me means to heal what's doled," he sang, and came up to sit beside her, where a basin of hot water scented with clean herbs and a robe of fur-lined brocade to wrap her in had appeared. He pulled her upright by her hair, and wrapped his arms around her sweat-and-blood-slickened flesh, and held her against him, her head leaning across his shoulder. There was a tremor in his voice when he spoke to her.

"Why did you allow all this?" He parted the tangled cloud of her black hair and wiped the spittle from her chin. "I might have killed you."

He wrung a sponge in the water and laved her down beginning with her face, which only looked at him glassy-eyed, the mouth making small noises of pain when the medicine worked upon a particularly deep scratch or bruise. He had dipped the sponge in twice more and the water in the basin had been tinged pink before she answered.

"I am not a mortal woman, though you've made me bleed like one," she said hoarsely. "I can endure what Sarah couldn't. I can receive what Sarah shouldn't."

He knotted her hair in his hand and pulled. "Do not," he said, hissing against her teeth, "say that name to me. Not in reproach, not in compassion, not _ever_." His anger was a goad to his lust; he forced her over on her face and took her again, roughly. The basin slopped over in his thrusts and water pooled under their knees, and she cried out for the pain of his love.

"Tell me, Lady, does it amuse you to watch me plumb the depths of my own depravity?" he said after he had finished, and took up his doting role of nurse once more. He washed her clean and folded her arms into the sleeves of the brocade robe like a child might do to a second-best doll—with care but without much affection. "Does it help you justify what you've done to me?"

"I've only done as you asked, beloved," she said quietly, leaning herself against his chest and stroking him gently. "I can consent to what Sarah couldn't."

"Stop saying her name," he said, and averted his eyes into the darkness. But he did not slap aside the hand that caressed him, right over a heart which had finally stopped raging. He listened for the sound of his own heartbeat. It seemed to beat very slowly.

"How long have I been here?" he asked, as her fingers reached up to stroke through his hair.

"For the length of seven songs and our bargain," she said. "For all the time that takes."

"How long for Sarah?" he asked, stuttering over the words. "How long has it been for _her_?"

"Please, Jareth," the Lady whispered to him, the memory of how Sarah had whispered just the same thing, as her little fingernails scratched delicately over his scalp and fine-combed his hair with her own hand, her eyes wide in earnest exhaustion and just the right note of defeat. "I can't stand it. Please, stop hurting me. Go away and let me sleep just one night without wondering if you'll be coming to rape me. I'll do anything you ask. I'll be happy to do it, if you only promise it's the last time."

He grabbed her hand, and pushed her caresses away, but the Lady only smiled at him, as if it were a coy gesture and not her wristbones being squeezed in his fist. "Forever and always for Sarah. Even when you weren't there, she was full of dreading you. And long after you've gone, still too, that dread. That's how long you were with her. Forever."

"Am I with her even now?" he asked, troubled by this idea.

"Even now," the Lady breathed, and she sighed and kissed his breastbone with tender lips. "Now and always, always and forever, the memory of you inside her."

"Show me," he said, and released her. "Show her to me. I want to see her. I need to see if that's truly so."

The Lady spread her hand out over the spilled water, and it turned into ice. In this frosty mirror, he could see forms and colors coalescing. And then, there was Sarah. She looked haggard, Jareth was pleased to note, as if she hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month.

But he didn't recognize the room. The bed was wider than the former had been, and it lacked the pretty pinky-red canopy—which, when the time had come, he had been tickled to discover, was the exact same shade as the petals of her labia—and the childish ornaments and games and toys were all gone away. It was some other nook of her father's house. The wallpaper was the same garish spray of day-lilies and grasses that had adorned childhood room.

Sarah was wrapped in a long heavy nightgown and bedrobe, sitting on this bed with her finger marking her place in a black book, and listening to his dwarf— _Hogwarts? Hermione?_ —about to reply.

"I understand what your problems are, Hoggle," she said in a voice thin from tiredness, as if she'd been over this before, as if it were a response often given.

_Hoggle! Yes, that was his name_ , Jareth thought.

"But I can't do anything about it," Sarah continued. "And I wouldn't, even if I could." She substituted a red ribbon for her finger and set the book aside.

"I'm scared," Hoggle said. "We're all scared, Sarah. The world in there gits smaller evr'y day. We lost a half-acre to nuthin'. It just popped out like it was never even there. And some of the Gentry have come by making inquiries. We put 'em off, but we'll need help soon. You need t'come. You need to step in. We can't tend the Labyrinth on our own. It's dying, and it's your duty to help, situation bein' what it is."

"No," Sarah said, as if from a very great distance. "It's not. When I called on all of you, who answered me? Only Sir Didymus, and when you saw what Jareth did to him, none of you lifted so much as a finger to help me. I'm returning the favor. You made this bed. Now you can lie in it."

The dwarf made a noise as if to interrupt, but Sarah plowed forward in her determined way. Jareth smiled in spite of himself, pleased to see how she refused to be bossed around.

"No," Sarah said. She closed her dark-ringed eyes. Her mouth trembled. Then her weakness dropped away. She opened her eyes and stared the dwarf down. "No. You're on your own. All of you. You'll have to decide for yourselves what you want to do. Let the Labyrinth collapse, give it to someone else, move it to Yonkers, I really don't give a shit. But leave me out of it."

Hoggle dropped his eyes and slowly nodded. "Sarah," he said after a time, looking up at her gently, with tender regard and longing. "Can I see him? You know I haven't… I haven't yet."

"Would you like to?" Sarah said, as if both pleased and ashamed to be asked. "Truly?"

"Very much. I… want to see he's okay is all. Can I?"

Sarah smiled, but it was a brittle and fragile smile. She held out her hand. "Sure. Help me up. If he's sleeping, though, you have to promise not to wake him. You don't know how tired I get. He needs so much. It's wearing me out."

"Where are they going?" Jareth asked as they walked out of the room, Sarah taking small awkward steps as if she still felt the pain of him in her sex. He leaned this way and that over the ice-glass, but couldn't see if the box was there in the room. _It must be somewhere else_ , he thought. _She is going to show him the box_. And he felt a sudden rush of gratitude that the dwarf— _Hiddleston? Hedgehog? Fred?_ —felt such loyalty for him, even imprisoned as he was, that he would ask so courteously to check on his welfare.

_Perhaps the dwarf will find a way to open the box,_ Jareth thought smugly to himself. _He always was useful for finding a door._

"Follow them," Jareth commanded the Lady. "I want to see what happens."

But she was gone, and the mirror of ice cracked all from side to side.

* * *

Jareth had some time to think on the nature of his song as the long day passed. He played with the crystals of ice, formed them into a sphere in the palm of his hand.

_Where is the Lady when she isn't here?_ He wondered, letting the orb flow from one hand to another, sometimes liquid, sometimes solid, sometimes drooling around his fingers and sleeves like quicksilver. _Does she go out? Does she go outside to see Sarah? Perhaps to discuss my faults? Perhaps to conspire together? Perhaps to plan further tortures for me?_

He hurled the crystal deep into the depths of the endless corridor. Precise, uncanny, it flew back to him from the other direction, as if it had gone around the world entire.

* * *

"A Song of Vengeance," Jareth said, and bowed to the Lady on her throne.

_Here is our story, now hear me:_   
_I struck her, and she struck me._   
_Circle come around, circle come around._

_Here is torture, eternity:_   
_They bound you, and you bound me._   
_Circle ever-turning, circle come around._

_Hear our faults, confessed freely:_   
_I hurt her, and she hurt me!_   
_Circle ever-smaller, circle come around._

_Hear us, Lady, our lamenting plea:_   
_No choice for her, no choice for me._   
_Circle of vengeance, circle turns about._

_A crown for you, if you help me:_   
_A death for her, a last word with me._   
_Help me break the circle, circle come unbound._

"Will it do?" he asked her. The sound of violins and slow accordions and a tambourine in their ¾ time faded into the endless night of the Lady's halls.

"A death," she said, immaculate in her fur mantle on her throne of ice, as if she'd not been vengefully defiled for eternal hours some few hours ago. As if she had forgotten it, or put it away. "You want only a death for Sarah? That's your vengeance?"

"It is. But before that happens, I want her to know I've won, and I want to be the one to tell her so," he said, sitting down and then laying down atop his stage. It was his magic, after all, that was being made here; it was part of the substance of his own self, and a part of that magic disappeared with every song. He was exhausted. She was exhausting him. "I had thought perhaps of singing a song about her slow torture. Of skinning her and letting you wear her skin like a coat. Or sending her nightmares so garish that she committed suicide rather than go to sleep, but all these plans bore me. I can see now that my mistake was excess, and giving her cause to want revenge. I used her badly, or at least she believes I did. I can admit to that." He pulled the ice-crystal out of his pocket and made it dance across his stretched-out hand. "So enough of all that. I want an end. I want the circle broken. If it stays intact, who knows? She might find herself on top again, and that is an idea I can't abide."

"And a crown for me?" The Lady asked. "Would you make me queen of your kingdom, truly?"

"I am completely indifferent to the idea of you as my spouse. But it's within my power to grant, once I'm free."

"A crown would set me free," she whispered. "No more of this prison. No more hunger never satiated. No more servitude. Freedom."

"Be aware, my treatment of you would likely be not much better then than it is now," he said, "but I would at least honor you and your role. What say you, Lady. Will it suffice? Do we have a bargain?"

"First, your seven songs," she said. "The pact has been made between us; there's no release for you until the songs are sung for me. True songs. But if you would like your revenge, you must promise me your love. Tomorrow night, sing me a love-song. Woo me, win me, tell me of all the things you will bring me to our marriage. If I am moved, I will answer you yes. And I will make all your wishes come true."

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

**VIII. A Song of Courtship**

* * *

_To love is to own, to have and to hold,_  
_So will you be owned by me?_

 _To love is to grant, and then to supplant,_  
_Your will be suborned under me._

 _To love is to break, but never forsake,_  
_So will you be trothed to me?_

 _To love is to know, carnally so,_  
_So give all your body to me._

 _To love is to fly, to steal, and to lie,_  
_Love, let me lie with thee._

 _My love is not free, but brings freedom to thee,_  
_Beloved, be you loved by me._

"I will," the Lady said. "Jareth, I will. I shall, I am. I will be with you, forever."

They flew through the vast corridors of night in the shapes of owls, and they mated like owls on the wing.

"Give me a child," the Lady whispered, wrapping her arms around her neck. "If I am to be your wife, let me have your child. Let me have your son."

"Yes," he said carelessly. "If you wish. It's all one to me. But if you are to be my wife, you must also fulfill your promise to me. Let me speak to Sarah. I want her to know that death is coming, and I want her to know it's coming from me."

"Tomorrow night," she said. "A song of death. And then you will have your revenge, and I will have your heart, and all things will be as they are meant to be." He felt as though spiders were crawling over him where she touched him, and her face had become a corpse's, and those green eyes only glow-worms turning deep in rotten sockets.

"Death," the Lady said.


	9. Chapter 9

**IX. A Song of Death  
**

* * *

"But will she hear me?" Jareth said, dubiously. He stood inside the frame of the double doors, looking in at his musical altar. The Lady's hand was cold on his shoulder, but she felt warm to him. All of his clothing had become a species of iron and stone, and his blood all ice in his veins. "Will she listen?"

"When you give voice, she always hears, beloved," the Lady told him softly. "Whether it be a day or a week or a month between one song and the next, she hears you. Go in and speak to her now. Say to her what you want to say." And her little hand gave him an encouraging push.

He walked up to the seven-sided box and turned it upon its back. Six gaps stood there upon a fulcrum of the golden sigil. He spun the box and it turned like a zoetrope, giving him a clear vision of Sarah.

The window was open, blowing in sweet night-smells onto a rocking-chair that faced this window, and not him. The hour was obviously very late; there were no sounds or noises from the rest of the house, and the outside wind carried only the distant conversations of crickets and nocturnal birds. Sarah was in her chair, turned away from him, gliding softly back and forth to the slow rhythm of her lullaby-song.

_But I am not sleeping now_ , Jareth thought. _Nor does she know I'm awake. Why does she sing?_ The song didn't seem to be for him. It didn't seem to be for anything at all. It was only a sweet and humming sort of song, punctuated by long notes of silence and the sound of the rockers tamping against the weight they carried.

Jareth felt pity for her. If he turned it and looked at it the right way, he was able to feel genuinely sorry for her. She was hours from her death and so wakeful now, when the world and even himself were so quiescent.

"Sarah," he asked quietly into her room. "Do you remember why I came to you?"

"Hush, Jareth," Sarah said, even more quietly, not even breaking the motion of her rocking as she answered, not surprised, not afraid. "I don't have time for you now."

"There may not be much more time for me to speak," he replied. "An end is coming."

She was silent for a long time, head bowed, but she did answer, eventually.

"I suppose you came because I called you," she murmured. "I was eighteen and packing for college and going through all of my things. I found the red book again in the back of my dresser. And I remembered you. _You_. I said, 'I wish the Goblin King would love me, right now.' I was so stupid. Optimistic like an adult, thinking there could be a new start. Arrogant like a child, thinking I could control you. But all in all, you came because when I called, I loved you. And you didn't love me."

"I _did_ love you," Jareth admitted, overwhelmed by sudden feeling. "And I was cruel. I squandered your love on my own selfishness. I wish I could take it all back. Could we, Sarah? Could we have a fresh start? Will you forgive me?"

She stopped rocking. "Jareth, have you ever wondered in your life, why it's always up to women to forgive the men who wrong them?"

He felt stricken to his core, as if a lightning-bolt had moved from the crown of his head to the roots of his sex.

"Anyway," Sarah said softly. "I spent all my forgiveness on someone else, so there's none left for you." She stood up carefully and turned around.

"Look," she said. "Isn't he beautiful?" Her plump breasts were bare in the moonlight, and there was a baby in her arms, his red mouth nuzzling at her nipple. A baby four months old, perhaps five, longshanked and skinny. He opened that mouth once, and a dribble of her blue-white milk ran down his tiny chin.

"Do you see?" she asked him, drawing closer. Jareth could see. He saw that the baby had a cap of silky black hair, but for the rest of him, he looked as though he were Jareth himself in miniature, softened, innocent, and new. "His name is Zedek. It means—"

"Justice," he said, sneering. "A Hebrew name."

"He _is_ Hebrew," Sarah said. "I converted. Before his birth. To give him into the protection of the God who protected me." As she drew closer to the box, Jareth saw the baby open his eyes—one green, and one black as night—and listen closely to their conversation, as if he could understand it all.

"Zedek," Jareth cooed, thinking that the name might do for now, but he'd surely pick out a new one, not so tinged with references to unlucky events surrounding his birth or a mother he'd surely help the baby forget. He took up the line of Sarah's lullaby and sang to the child. The boy stretched out one plump hand to him, but Sarah drew him away and shushed him and rocked him.

"Why is he alive?" he asked, wonderstruck. "If I'd been in your place…"

"Yes, if you'd been in my place, he never would have been born," Sarah said, but her tone was soft so as not to disturb the child, and she bounced him to keep him from struggling toward the voice of his father. "I thought about it," she admitted coldly, even as she cradled the child even more lovingly. "But how could I? He… he's as innocent as I was, and even more helpless. And I love him. He's the only good thing you gave me." Her face turned stony and she turned her face away, the words coming out with the faint flavor of gratitude spicing bitter honesty. "Thank you for giving him to me."

"My firstborn child. The heir to my kingdom. My son," Jareth breathed.

" _Your_ child?" Sarah asked sharply. " _Your_ heir? _Your_ son? He's not yours. He'll _never_ be yours. I made that choice when I put you in the box. He's _my_ son. Mine alone."

The baby, reaching out for him again and denied, began to whine and cry, a surprisingly full-throated sound from such a tiny babe.

"When I get out of here—" he threatened, but Sarah interrupted him.

"When I get out of here, woman, oh death, oh woe to you, oh how I shall make you suffer!" Sarah said, in a girlish parody of his own voice. "Typical. You think I don't know what you'd like to do to us? Kill me, and raise him to be as… as cruel and conscienceless as you? But you'll never get out, and you'll _never_ have him. He's mine!"

Zedek began to cry in earnest, and Jareth's voice was as hard as his heart. "Death is coming for you, Sarah," he said. "It is coming tonight. I only came here tonight to tell you so. Tell my son good-bye."

"No," she said. Not defiant, not afraid, simply denying.

"But I made a promise," he said. He reached out his hands for the baby, and the boy reached for him… and he had him. "Goodbye, Sarah."

* * *

The horned and taloned shadows of the Lady's infernal servants clustered thickly around him, clawing at the baby in his arms. "Get off me," he snarled at them. "Don't touch him."

"Brother," he heard one whisper. "Do you see my crown?" And in the shadow-head of the twisted etheric body, he saw the points of a crown.

"And mine," said another.

"And mine."

"Get back!" he snarled at them, grabbing one-handed at bowl of incense that reeked with an illuminating green fume, and throwing it across the path of the insubstantial shadow-men. They shrieked and gibbered as the gums of the incense broke upon the floor. "You're only dreams. Dreams of things that were never alive in the first place. Be silent now!" But still they advanced, and his son cried with terror and cold in his arms. He scrambled atop the platform, thinking to take the high ground, but the shadows clutched and clawed at him and finally pressed themselves so close to his skin that they became his skin, and he was frozen solid.

"Give me the child," the Lady said, approaching out of the shadows.

Jareth could feel the baby kicking in his arms, but his arms seemed to have been turned to stone. All of him was stone. He had become the altar of sacrifice, and the baby laid across it in his arms. He couldn't hold on to him, but soon that didn't matter. The baby's lively kicks grew slower, and then his movements ceased except for the frantic revolution of his eyes as he looked around in terror.

"You promised me your son," the Lady reminded him. "Through ages untold and witnessing horrors unspeakable, I have wandered the wilderness and preyed upon the children of men. Give me the child, for my judgement is implacable, and my justice is cruel."

"No," Jareth said, through icy lips. "I never agreed to that!" Somewhere, inside his heart, he could hear Sarah's voice. She was calling her son's name, and cursing his. _Sarah_ , he thought.

"Jareth," the Lady said. "How long have we been together in the dark, you and I? How long have you had to come face to face with your own nature, and pass judgement against yourself?

"You asked to see; I showed you the truth about my dominion.  
You asked to know me; I showed you that I was your judge.  
You asked to teach me pleasure; your pleasure was in my pain.  
You asked to know your own memories; you took up none of the burden of your responsibilities.  
You asked for revenge on the woman you wronged; I was willing to grant it.  
You wanted to give me the life you had planned for her; I agreed to take it up, you foul thing.  
And you asked me for a death, and now I shall grant one.

"This is the very death you asked for, the death that will hurt Sarah far more than her own. So sing me your seventh song, the death of your child, the son you promised to me. Sing the life out of his body, and give his life to me. For I love you, and you have given yourself utterly over to my power. Sing your last song, and you will be free to go."

_No!_ he screamed from inside the icy block he had become. _No, no! Please don't make me!_ But as this was not the song he had asked to sing, his voice was silent.

The baby moved even more slowly now, his eyelashes and hair going white with icy frost. Torture, torture, he wanted so desperately to hold the boy close and him, and couldn't do a thing to protect him now.

_Life,_ he thought _. Life for you, and death for me._

"I feel my wrongness, I confess," he sang, "Spare the child, let me make redress!" but still the Lady stared at him with her lamp-bright eyes.

"That is not the song we agreed upon. What was promised was promised. What was bargained was bargained. What should be done will be done." _  
_  
_All that I am_ , he thought. _All I have done. All I have sung, all for this._

_I should be damned._

"Take my death instead," he begged her.

"Let me be certain," the Lady said in her terrible voice. "Are you offering to sacrifice yourself in for your own son, dying heroically in his place?"

"No," Jareth said, feeling the lips of the box open tenderly to receive him, tenderly piercing him around the amulet now over his heart. "There's nothing heroic in me. I'm a monster. There can be no substitution. He was never mine to offer. He belongs only to Sarah. Take me instead of him, because I am the one who's earned my death. Give me what I've earned. Give Sarah back what little she has. Lady, be satisfied, I beg you."

"You must sing," the Lady whispered, touching her cold hand to his face, lifting up a teardrop on her gloved fingers, and tasting the truth.

He felt the bitterness of all he'd done pierce him more keenly than the stabbings of the lid. His tears melted all the ice, and Jareth sang, remembering the one song the Lady had deigned to sing to him:

_A woman I wronged asked a favor of thee,_   
_But now I beg you, take the price from me._   
_I judge myself guilty in my own case,_   
_And face the judgement that I should face._   
_Destroy me now, knowing my nature_   
_With as much cruelty as befits my low stature._   
_Take my life, and let Sarah's son go free._

He felt his death tugging at his body, lapping at his heels, a woman's Hell, a woman's cold body, a damnation now interested in inviting him in. "Zedek," Jareth said, and kissed him heartily all over his face. "Tell your mother this." And he whispered a blessing over the boy, the only good thing he ever remembered being able to give.

He lifted the child upward even as the box bit down upon him utterly, and rent him in two pieces. The last thing he saw was Sarah reaching down to receive the son he gave back to her.

"Jareth," Sarah said, or perhaps the Lady. "Jareth. Jareth, good-bye."

 


	10. Chapter 10

**X. The Curtain Falls**

* * *

The dybbuk-box can be opened now, if one wishes to do so. Inside is a little empty space containing some fragments of hair and bone, and slips of paper-committed prayers, all going to dust with the weight of their own age. These can be brushed aside to reveal a seven-sided mirror, the seat of confrontation, where a guilty spirit must meet itself and be trapped with itself forever, or be set free into a land from which none ever return.

"Mama," a young boy will say, picking it up from where it sits on a high bookshelf, using each shelf as a rung on a ladder to reach it. He has just begun to be confident in his climbing skills, though it gives his Mama fits. She lifts him down, but he holds on to the box and refuses to give it up.

She remembers another child who liked to climb and perhaps might have fallen if she hadn't jumped to save him. And she mislikes this peculiar child to play with this particular box, knowing what it might contain. "Mama," he says, rattling the hollow box. "My father's bones are here." And he will start to cry until he forgets why he is crying. His grief is too much for him to articulate. She cuddles him and neither reproaches him for his tears nor tries to jolly him out of them. He is a profound child; she wants him to have his own feelings. But he will not let the box go.

"He told me something," the boy will say with all the earnestness of his innocent heart, looking at the person he loves best in all the world. "He told me something before he died. He wanted me to say it to you. Mama, can I tell you?"

And his Mama will nod, afraid of some last and terrible curse, but instead the boy only smiles and turns the box over and over in his hands, as if it is empty of any danger. It is so light. _Perhaps it is all right_ , she thinks.

"He told me… he will sleep, but I will have the dreams. And he said…" He screws up his strange eyes in concentration. "He said he was going away forever. He said for you, that he never wants you to have to dream about him again. He said. He said never. And he said he was sorry." He smiles, pleased to have remembered everything.

Sarah will pick up her son and kiss him and rock him and swing him by his arms until he shrieks for joy—but not for too much longer, because he is growing strong, and heavy with it. No matter, one day he will fly. He is a magical creature, and his heart is all goodness, all kindness, all hope. There is not even a hint of shadow in him. He has all of her. He has all he needs.

* * *

Now the box needs no especial tending. Now it is quiet; now it sleeps.

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Author's Afterword: Coda and Reprise**

* * *

In a conversation with FrancesOsgood in 2014, we discovered that we had both seen a fantastic episode of Great Performances starring Kiri Te Kawana in the title role of Barbara Willis Sweete's film The Sorceress. One particular startling and highly evocative image in that film is the beautiful kidnapped prince, Ruggerio, being lifted onto a high polygonal pedestal as the Sorceress, Alcina, has him stripped of his mortal clothing by her magical servants and re-dressed, as the pedestal revolves, in clothing that matches Alcina's own. It is a frankly erotic moment, one that frames a woman's desire as active and powerful, and the man's receipt of that desire as passive and receptive, in a reversal of the usual order of sexual objectification and sexual desire.

As we talked about that imagery, I challenged FrancesOsgood to write a story centered around that image, one that could incorporate her considerable talent for poetry. She ran with the idea and efficiently published her excellent story "Seven," which you can find on this site.

As for me, I quickly grew jealous at having to watch all the fun but not participating myself. I banged out quite a few chapters, following Fanny's lead, but eventually became dissatisfied with the story I was telling. I abandoned the story, nearly finished, in 2014, and it languished until Nov. 2016, when I finally felt I had a clear vision and direction for what ended up being a rather gruesome tale. I understood in a rush in October 2016 that this is the story of Jareth's trial for rape. Witnesses testify, evidence is produced, and sentencing is carried out—not by an outsider, but by the accused himself.

This is the darkest piece of writing I've ever done. I'm not comfortable with it, but I found it very satisfying to write. When Sarah rocks the dybbuk-box to sleep, exhausted and crying, she is symbolically tending not Jareth but her own trauma. Trauma is a thing that victims have to tend, whether or not they want to. It takes so much of the victim's energy and substance, just like an infant child might, but without providing the compensating joys of motherhood. Eventually, though, the trauma grows up and leaves, only coming back to remind you it exists, sporadically taking over a small corner of your life like a college kid coming back for the holidays and doing a semester's worth of their laundry in your basement.

One of the oldest story themes in this fandom is sex and power. How not, when the movie drips with it? Very talented writers have taken up this idea and produced stories in which Jareth coerces Sarah into sex—she is often able to maintain her autonomy by finding pleasure in his attentions. And then there are the rare handful of stories where Sarah's rape is a premise, and the plot is about Sarah's revenge. Rape is wrong, but some of those power-inequity or BDSM stories are just so hot. Narratives informed by a political message are intellectually comforting, but propaganda can be as irritating as a dry hump. I didn't particularly plan to write either kind of story, but this is the story that happened, so I ran with it. There is a lot of rape in this story, most of it sexy. But there's also a victim who successfully brings justice to her rapist, and does so in a way that seems fair to her, and ultimately to the man she's condemned.

And then there's David Bowie. *drags on cigarette* Shit.

A few days after the initial shock of his death passed, I read accounts of how Bowie, ascending to the first heights of fame at 25, had deflowered the then-fifteen-year-old Lori Maddox. I was not entirely surprised. In Labyrinth, Bowie is 37 and Jennifer Connelly is a nubile 15, and the sexual tension between the two actors and the characters they play is the dynamo that has generated this fandom's enduring power. Still, it isn't easy to hear that an artist who's laid the foundation of your own art has (maybe probably definitely) done something truly awful. The only way for me to be at peace with Bowie's actions is to listen to Lori Maddox and what she says. Maddox speaks of her first sexual experience as beautiful, a wonderful memory that she'll treasure forever. Most fifteen-year-olds in Maddox's position aren't nearly so lucky. So Bowie dodged a bullet. Not a legal one; a moral one.

I don't have it in me to blindly worship my personal gods. David Bowie was an amazing artist. And also this: he was reckless with his sexuality in his youth, and he hurt people with it. One thing doesn't erase the other. There is, however, a balance. When I weigh his life, the good and the bad, I find the scales tip favor of pardoning him. You, of course, must make your own judgements in his case, and forgive, condemn, or punish as you believe appropriate. It only makes a difference to you; I don't think it matters to him anymore.

* * *

The following are the sources used to compose this story, listed in order of the inspiration they provided.

The Sorceress (1993): Directed by Barbara Willis Sweete, with music by Handel. The sorceress Alcina summons her guests to her underground, serpentine kingdom, and seduces Prince Ruggerio with her beautiful voice. I borrowed visual elements of this film, which can be found on YouTube, to set my stage inside the dybbuk-box.

"The Dybbuk-Box:" You can read about the real so-called "dybbuk-box" on Wikipedia. It should be noted that a "dybbuk" is a malicious ghost and not an inhuman demon or even a Lilith-demon as I've used here. However, in Jewish folklore, it is women who most often interact with dybbuks, facing them, consumed by them, defying them, and entering into a form of specifically feminine spiritual power by those interactions.

The Possession (2012): This horror movie uses the "dybbuk box" as a container for a malicious spirit. In the film, the dybbuk-box contains a mirror. According to the rabbi who assists the family in crisis, this is so the evil spirit must confront the face of its own evil, as part of its punishment. While the film doesn't capitalize on this idea, I found it useful to think of Jareth's purgatory as an endless mirror of his own bad deeds.

"The Devil's Dancefloor" and "Divorce Proceedings" by TheRealEatsShootsAndLeaves (fanfiction.net): These two short stories in the Labyrinth canon were inspirational to me. In the former, the audience is asked to question whether or not Jareth can be judged guilty of hurting Sarah, if it is Sarah's wish to be hurt. In the latter, Sarah gets some dark and gritty revenge on her abusive husband.

"The Witching Hour" by FrancesOsgood (fanfiction.net): I always go back to FrancesOsgood in a pinch. In this story, Jareth entraps and imprisons Sarah after she makes an unconscious wish. Terrible sorrow ensues.

"Toby's Wish" by HyborianQueen fanfiction.net): More tasty Dark!Jareth. The story is so excellently constructed that I don't want to give anything away. However, one note that rang out to me when I was writing this story was an attempt to bind a rapacious and frightening Jareth by appealing to "his own good conscience." That's devastating. I had to borrow that idea.

The Babadook (2014): This horror movie, about a demon who once summoned can never be banished, is a metaphor for the grieving process and for healing from trauma. I liked the idea that trauma can never be fully exorcised, only quieted and tended. I lifted that idea for this story.

"The Return of the Thin White Duke" (2015) by Neil Gaiman, illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano: Gaiman writes the best fanfiction, I swear. In this story, the Thin White Duke (and one can easily read "Thin White Duke" for "Goblin King") is confronted by a dark lady who entraps him in her underworld kingdom until he sings songs of truth for her. Huh. It sounds familiar, but it's probably a matter of coincidence what these two stories have in common. And if not, I owe Gaiman so much that I don't begrudge him a thing. Illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano: you will find one used as the cover image of this story.

The Good Place (2016): In this NBC comedy series, a truly awful woman is sent to Heaven due to clerical error. She is tutored in 'goodness' by a doctor of ethics and human morality. She most definitely does not want to go to The Bad Place. As a reviewer on the AV Club mentioned, though, one question we ought to ask is if it's right for finite and earthly evil to be paid out with infinite and eternal punishment. I've made Jareth's Hell finite and limited in this story as a result.

There are probably more influences than I can count any time I write, so forgive me if I've left out something obvious. And as per usual, thank you for your readership and the help and feedback you've given me. Goodnight.


End file.
